From Student to Teacher: Tips for Successful Presentations

Being a physician is being a teacher. Physicians teach patients, students, and peers all the time. Opportunities to educate occur in both formal and informal settings, with advance notice and on the fly. Building a strong foundation of teaching skills before becoming a fully fledged physician is important, and residency training provides that opportunity.

A recent study in Medical Education found that residents had three different attitudes about teaching: enthusiastic, reluctant, and rewarded. This study found that enthusiastic teachers are committed, they make time to teach, and teaching increases their job satisfaction. Reluctant teachers have enthusiasm but are typically early in their training and feel limited by clinical workload and unprepared. Rewarded teachers feel that teaching is worthwhile and derive satisfaction from the rewards and recognition they receive for teaching.

No matter your attitude about teaching, a few tips can help you become an effective resident-as-teacher!

Formal Presentation
Whether you like it or not, being in medicine means that, at some point, you will give a formal presentation to learners or colleagues. You may be asked to present a case at a morbidity and mortality (M&M) conference, deliver a morning report, or present research at a local or national conference. Whatever the case, the most common presentation is the slideshow.


Before beginning to actually piece together your presentation, start the planning process. First, consider how much time you have to present, which will dictate what you can cover. Then, determine who your audience is. What would you like them to know or learn? Think about ideas or concepts that will require visual aids such as flow charts, images, tables, or graphs. Consider the sources (eg, databases, textbooks) you will need in order to provide the most compelling information for your presentation.

One good tip is that compiling information in prose format first is helpful. This allows a better organization of thoughts and also provides an opportunity to work on assembling visual aids. Once this is complete, you can begin to think about how to break down the big load of information into smaller digestible bites.

Each smaller bite of information can then be represented by a slide. An effective presentation is one in which the slides are not loaded with words. Honestly, the fewer words on a slide, the better. Think of the slideshow as simply the means to support what you are already saying verbally. You do not want the audience focused on reading information while you are speaking. The slide should be available to remind the audience of the most important points or to provide a visual aid that makes the verbal information easier to understand. All of this allows the presenter to be more engaged with the audience, rather than simply joining them in reading off of a slide.

Here are a few slides that every single presentation should include: first, a title slide. This should include the title of the presentation, your name, your position, and the date. Next, you should have a slide that includes goals and objectives. Goals are broad, overarching ideas. Objectives are actual tasks, skills, or actions your audience should be able to take or perform by the end of your presentation.

Example :




Finally, every presentation should include a slide for sources and a final slide to acknowledge others who assisted the project, case, or presentation in some way.

Chalk Talks
Similar to a formal slideshow presentation, "chalk talks" are small teaching sessions for which you can prepare. Usually, your audience consists of students, and your aim is to teach them about a core clinical concept related to the clinical rotation. These talks are meant to be brief but high-yield. The topics often transcend more than one specialty. For example, some topics may include "how to choose maintenance fluids" or "how to workup altered mental status." These are tasks all physicians should be prepared to handle. That being said, teaching a core but specialty-specific topic is often necessary—for example, developmental milestones in pediatrics.

Regardless of the topic, preparation is crucial. These talks may be informal, but they should be thoughtful. They are designed to help students learn and retain information. This is a great opportunity to teach mnemonics or simply draw visual aids as you sit side by side with a learner and discuss the topic. These sessions often occur when there is some down time in clinic or on the inpatient service. As a resident, you should have several chalk talks prepared that you can always use to teach medical students at a moment's notice. This not only hones your ability to teach but enhances the learner's educational experience while on a clinical rotation.

Bedside Teaching
This is often the most challenging part of being a resident-teacher. Teaching at the bedside is an art that involves balancing the needs and health literacy of the patient with the needs of the learners on the team. These teaching sessions are usually very brief (1-2 minutes) and usually highlight one clinical pearl relevant to the patient. It is harder—although not impossible—to plan for these sessions, as the clinical pearl is often dictated by examination findings, which are often unpredictable, or a learner's deficiency in one area. For example, teaching at the bedside may be used to highlight an interesting physical examination finding and emphasize proper technique.

During these sessions, being constructive is important. This is not just for the sake of the learner's morale but for the sake of the patient; no member of the team should be made to look incompetent in front of patients. Also, avoid medical jargon as much as possible even though you are communicating with other medical professionals, as this can scare patients and their families. Terms that sound routine and benign to medical professionals—such as the word "benign," even—may actually sound unfamiliar to patients and make them worry.

A Word About Feedback
Part of being a teacher is providing feedback to the learner. Giving real-time feedback to encourage or discourage a behavior that needs to be addressed immediately is often important—for example, letting a learner know that she handled a difficult conversation with a patient very well; or perhaps on the contrary, letting a learner know that she used too much jargon while speaking with a family during bedside rounds. The best type of feedback helps the learner grow. Therefore, time needs to be set aside to offer constructive criticism. The session has to occur early enough for the learner to implement the suggested changes. In other words, feedback must be timely and expected.

You must clarify that feedback is different from an evaluation. An evaluation is a summation of all that you've observed in the learner over a long period of time. This may focus on broad milestones or skills and usually occurs at the end of a clinical rotation or at the end of the academic year. Feedback is specific to a certain instance or skill; it is concrete and is not based on a judgement but on an observation. It often does not get factored into a grade or evaluation, unless the learner has failed to act on the feedback.

Being able to articulate what you observed and why it was effective or ineffective in that situation is important. You must then be able to offer suggestions for improvement. For example, it is not helpful to say, "You looked disinterested on rounds and need to demonstrate more engagement and curiosity." That is a statement loaded with judgement that may be inaccurate. Perhaps the learner is very engaged and only appears to be disinterested because they are in deep thought. It is also not helpful to say, "You are doing a great job on the rotation. Just keep reading more, and you'll be fine." This is far too vague and unspecific.

More helpful feedback focuses on facts and observations. For example, you can point out the disorganized parts of an oral presentation or written history and physical note. This is not judgmental. In medicine, presentations and notes follow a generally accepted order. Therefore, not only can you point out the places in which they deviate from the norm, but you can offer a structure for the learner to follow the next time. This is far more helpful than saying, "Your notes are disorganized, and you need to do a better job conveying information," or simply correcting someone's writing style.

Like any other skill in the profession, teaching and presentation skills grow over time. A bit of thought and preparation—using tips like the ones above or those taken from a favorite mentor—will go a long way to making you feel comfortable with this crucial aspect of being a doctor.



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